The focus on public policy and health equity is discussed in reference to the current global health policy discussion on Universal Health Coverage (UHC). This initiative has strong commitment from the leadership of the international organizations involved, but a lack of policy clarity outside of the health financing component may limit the initiative’s impact on health inequity. In order to add...

Global health diplomacy is an emerging discipline where health is incorporated into traditional diplomacy as a foreign policy tool. As, with any new area, there is a need for training. This article sets out what global health policy involves and the current academic response to providing training for it.

It is widely believed that people in lowand middle-income countries (LMICs) are in poor health because they cannot reach medical services on time. Predicated on this belief, much of global health policy focuses on the physical provision of goods (clinics, equipment, and medicine) and getting doctors to ‘‘underserved’’ rural areas. Yet, recent evidence shows high utilization rates, even among th...

The importance of health policy and systems research (HPSR) and its role in aiding health system reforms has been increasingly recognized in recent years within the World Health Organization (WHO). An assessment of the 71 WHO Country Cooperation Strategies (CCS) that are publicly available and were published in English in 2012 was completed to determine the extent to which HPSR goals are incorp...

Background Advocacy coalitions play an increasingly prominent role within the global health landscape, linking actors and institutions to attract political attention and resources. This paper examines how coalitions negotiate among themselves and exercise hidden forms of power to produce policy on the basis of their beliefs and strategic interests.   Methods This paper examines the beliefs and ...

The Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study has been instrumental in guiding global health policy development since the early 1990s. The GBD 2010 project provided rich information about the key causes of mortality, disability-adjusted life years, and their associated risk factors in Japan and provided a unique opportunity to incorporate these data into health planning. As part of the latest update...

The Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) is a seminal event in tobacco control and in global health. Scientific evidence guided the creation of the FCTC, and as the treaty moves into its implementation phase, scientific evidence can be used to guide the formulation of evidence-based tobacco control policies. The International Tobacco Control Policy Evaluation Project (ITC Project) is ...